Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Betting the house on consciousness

Nature Neuroscience volume 10, pages 140–141 (2007)Cite this article

Studying consciousness is difficult because asking subjects to report their awareness of a stimulus perturbs that awareness. A new paper shows that asking subjects to wager on whether their response is correct can solve this problem.

Much of what we do seems to happen outside of our awareness. Many, if not most, of our behaviors seem resistant to conscious introspection, from the simple (adjusting our body posture) to the complex (deciding whether to marry someone). However, rigorously establishing the notion that much of our mental life is unconscious—popularized by the neuroscientist-turned-psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud—is not easy. Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of questions such as “Did you see the light?” asked in routine psychology experiments, more than a hundred years of research have demonstrated how difficult these questions are to answer in a satisfactory manner. The key problem is to define awareness so that it can be measured independent of internal settings that vary from subject to subject (such as a threshold above which an event registers in awareness) while still capturing its subjective character1,2. Another major issue is that attending to an initially nonperceived stimulus attribute to assess whether one is aware of it may cause it, over time, to rise to the level of awareness. There is thus a pressing need for means to better assess awareness.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Relevant articles

Open Access articles citing this article.

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

Figure 1: A conventional psychometric curve (blue), linking some stimulus parameter in a binary task to performance.

References

  1. Merikle, P.M. Am. Psychol. 47, 792–795 (1992).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Kunimoto, C., Miller, J. & Pashler, H. Conscious. Cogn. 10, 294–340 (2001).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Peirce, C.S. & Jastrow, J. Mem. Nat. Acad. Sci. 3, 73–83 (1884).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kolb, F.C. & Braun, J. Nature 377, 336–338 (1995).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Morgan, M.J., Mason, A.J.S. & Solomon, J.A. Nature 385, 401–402 (1997).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Persaud, N., McLeod, P. & Cowey, A. Nat. Neurosci. 10, 257–261 (2007).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  7. Maia, T.V. & McClelland, J.L. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 16075–16080 (2004).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  8. Crick, F. & Koch, C. Nature 375, 121–123 (1995).

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  9. Sergent, C. & Dehaene, S. Psychol. Sci. 15, 720–728 (2004).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Biology and Division of Engineering and Applied Science,

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

  2. Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, 216-76, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Christof Koch & Kerstin Preuschoff

Authors
  1. Christof Koch
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Kerstin Preuschoff
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Koch, C., Preuschoff, K. Betting the house on consciousness. Nat Neurosci 10, 140–141 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0207-140

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0207-140

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing